This past Monday was the three-year-anniversary of the domestic release for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Saturday marked the one-year mark for Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and today will be one year until the domestic debut of the untitled Star Wars Episode IX. If history follows, we’ll have a title for that ninth official Star Wars episode in just over a month, with a first teaser trailer in April during the Star Wars Celebration, a behind-the-scenes video during the SDCC next July and then a final trailer in October during a Monday Night Football game. Actually, if you count the Thursday night preview screenings, which are sure to be huge, today marks one year out from the opening day of the third and final chapter in the Rey/Kylo trilogy.
It’s being billed as the final chapter in the nine-movie (not counting the spin-offs) Skywalker/Solo saga, stemming from the original trilogy (Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi), the prequel trilogy (The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith) and now Disney’s sequel trilogy (The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi and whatever they title Episode 9). That pitch, that next year’s Star Wars story is the end not just of the current trilogy but also the end of the Skywalker/Solo saga which will have spanned 42 years, remains its best marketing hook. It won’t hurt that much of its alleged competition (Wonder Woman 1984, James Bond 25, Death on the Nile) ended up moving to 2020.
Since we just passed the one-year anniversary of The Last Jed, we had a certain amount of online re-litigation of Rian Johnson’s apparently controversial middle chapter. Those who loved or really liked it will argue that much of the negative feedback came from online trolling or at least a vocal minority that doesn’t represent the general audiences which gave the film an A Cinemascore and pushed it to $620 million domestic and $1.335 billion worldwide. Those who disliked The Last Jedi will argue, with a
presumption of
good faith, that it
wasn’t what they wanted in a new Star Wars episode that they had genuine artistic quibbles with the specific artistic choices and/or that the initial wave of pre-release raves did not end up lining up with the consensus of the general population.
Without getting into the (we hope) vocal minority that essentially took over the critical discourse by screaming “Girls… minorities… #NotInMyStarWars,” there is precedent to suggest that even a financially successful franchise installment can do damage to the overall brand if the general audience reception wasn’t all that hot. We’ve seen it before, from Batman v Superman ($873 million) doing real damage to Justice League ($658m) to The Matrix Revolutions ($427m) cratering just six months after The Matrix Reloaded earned $742m. Heck, like The Last Jedi, the initial pre-release reviews for the Wachowskis’ Matrix Reloaded were relatively positive. It wasn’t until after the film opened with a near-record $91m Fri-Sun ($134m Thurs-Sun) weekend that those who didn’t care for the philosophy-drenched and morally complicated sequel came to represent the word-of-mouth majority.
My own feelings notwithstanding (all three Matrix movies are good and Reloaded is the best of the trilogy), Matrix Reloaded barely doubled its $134 million Thurs-Sun debut in North America. Matrix Revolutions barely earned that much in total. So, yes, in this case, damage was done even with sky-high box office and initially decent reviews. Ditto, relatively speaking, with Divergent: Allegiant bombing ($66m domestic/$116m worldwide) even after Insurgent made about as much ($130m /$297m) as Divergent ($150m/$288m). Double-ditto Batman v Superman hurting Justice League, although in that case, we can only wonder what the reception would have been, for better or worse, had WB just let Zack Snyder make whatever the heck he and Chris Terrio had in mind and saved money that went to reshoots and the like.
There are, however, cases where the online or post-release handwringing doesn’t match up with the general public, and the numbers reflect that. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End made about as much in 2007 ($963 million versus $1.066 billion) as Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chestin 2006. As much as we all liked to decry Michael Bay’s Transformers sequels as the death of blockbuster cinema, they were pulling in top-tier domestic numbers ($307m, $409m and $353m) for the first three installments and top-tier global grosses ($709m, $836m, $1.12b and $1.1b) for the first four entries. As much as the critical establishment complained about Quantum of Solace ($168m/$585m versus $160m/$599m for Casino Royale), the franchise came back four-years-later with Skyfall which became James Bond’s first $300m+ domestic and $1b+ worldwide installment.
The best evidence that The Last Jedi’s relative downturn compared to The Force Awakens was mostly about inflated demand for a sequel to Return of the Jedi, is that it fell by about the same 1/3 domestic ($620 million versus $937m) and 1/3 worldwide ($1.35 billion versus $2.055b) as Empire Strikes Back and Attack of the Clones ($209m and $302m) compared to Star Wars ($322m) and Phantom Menace ($431m) in their respective initial domestic theatrical releases. Thus far, each Star Wars trilogy has peaked on the first chapter, hit proverbial bottom on the middle section and then recovered a bit for the capper. If Episode IX recovers as much as did Return of the Jedi ($252m) and Revenge of the Sith ($381m), then Star Wars 9 will earn around $745m-$782m domestic next year.
Now that may not happen. After all, fewer folks go to the movies just to go to the movies then they did in 1983 and 2005. Even with little in the way of year-end competition beyond Disney’s own Frozen 2 a month prior, Sony’s Jumanji 3 a week prior and Universal’s Cats on the same day, a super-budget fantasy spectacle like Star Wars 9 is more par-for-the-course than it was even as recently as 2005. Even by 2002, Attack of the Clones had to fend off competition from the likes of Spider-Man and (in terms of representing top-tier blockbuster spectacle) The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. Heck, even for Disney, Star Wars 9 is just one super-duper movie alongside Avengers: Endgame, Frozen 2, The Lion King and Toy Story 4.
It’s entirely possible that the comparatively eh 2.8x multiplier (most big Christmas movies earn around 3.5x their Fri-Sun debuts) means general audiences either didn’t like The Last Jedi or (
as I discussed a few months back) feel going forward that it represents a natural conclusion to the saga. by the end of Johnson’s middle chapter, Luke’s dead, Han’s dead, Leia is essentially dead (since Carrie Fisher passed two years ago), Kylo is the new Supreme Leader and the Resistance is nearly wiped out with only the vague hope that the next generation will win the battle that they could not. This ninth Star Wars chapter could feel like the Godfather Part III of the saga, a third installment of a story that was mostly finished at the conclusion of the first sequel.
If J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars threequel is able to at least approximate the domestic and worldwide grosses of The Last Jedi, then the folks who swore that everyone else hated the movie and that Star Wars had been ruined forever will be proven to have been a vocal minority taking advantage of a clickbait media and “some people say” journalism. Conversely, if the movie takes a big hit along the lines of The Matrix Revolutions or Jurassic Park III ($180 million/$367m versus $229m/$619m for Lost World), which would be around $750m worldwide, then that will provide a different answer. Although, even a drop comparable to Justice League gets Star Wars 9 over $1 billion (which shows just how much Last Jedi still earned last year), and the “series finale” hook will be enough to mitigate some of the viewership drain.
No matter what happens next year, Lucasfilm and Disney will have to take some time to figure out how to approach the Star Wars property when there are no more present-tense Skywalker/Solo stories to tell. It may mark the end of Star Wars as a biggest-of-the-big IP. And as long as Disney’s other IP (the MCU, Pixar, etc.) holds the fort and the Star Wars Land theme park delivers, there will be minimal concern in a single property that (presuming they are pulling back on stand-alone spin-offs) will be expected to produce one big movie every two or three years. That’s especially true if James Cameron’s Avatar 2, which thanks to the Fox sale will now be a Disney property, makes us all “sh*t our pants with our mouths wide open” on December 18, 2020.
The financial (and word-of-mouth) reception of Star Wars IX may finally prove, for better or worse, whether general audiences really liked The Last Jedi or whether it was the critics themselves who represented a vocal minority. If it holds the line or out-grosses Last Jedi (especially presuming it’s not some kind of Batman Forever-style course-correction), then we’ll know that the folks who tanked Last Jedi’s opt-in polling numbers were not representative of the general viewership. But if it takes a hard drop, then we’ll know that audiences showed up because they liked The Force Awakens but didn’t necessarily like what they got the second time around. To what extent Star Wars 9 is embraced by the populace will be the best indicator as to what extent they actually liked Star Wars 8
